There are moments
by OnyxIvyStone
Summary: It has to be enough.
1. There are moments

There are moments

_**I do not own Inuyasha. **_

_**Dedicated to he who owns a piece of my heart. Sun to my moon. Peter to my Wendy.**_

_**And, also, to Langus who gave me a wonderful piece of advice.**_

_**There are moments.**_

There are moments that force us to our knees simply because there is nowhere else to go. On our knees. Weakness. Vulnerabilities to the stance no matter how you look at it. Can't wield a sword. Can't draw a bow. Not in any way that is effective. Why is it in the moments we are most whole that we are most vulnerable? An arm returned and with it a weapon. A soul completed and with it one pure wish. We were broken from the moment we met but we were too lost to see much more than our shadows in the darkness. We were driven to our knees, though, in the end. Driven there because we could no longer stand. Driven there in a moment of loss. What did we have to fight for? A lover who never really loved. A child that was not of the flesh. They were our worlds. They were the reasons we kept going. There is only one thing more dangerous than someone with something to protect… It's someone who has lost everything they ever loved and no longer has anything to lose. We were on our knees. We were vulnerable and we had lost everything. We should not have succeeded. Not alone. But we did. Lost. Broken. Alone. Forced to our knees. Lone candles fluttering in the night. We were enough to force the darkness back.

We pass as shadows in the forest. Shadows of who we once were. The fearsome inuyoukai warrior, who had claimed his father's lands with the blood of those who tried to oppose him. The gentle, loving human miko dragged from the future to a destiny that she could have run away from but chose to make her own. We pass each other among the trees and our shadows touch.

"Are they dead? Are they all dead?"

"Taken by the monk's curse, but Rin was taken by the darkness first."

"I was too late."

We turn and look at each other across the small expanse. Amber clashes with azure. Day clashes with night. "We were both too late."

"So you know he is dead."

"I know it in your gaze, Miko."

"Did you love her?"

"Did you love him?"

"Yes. In the only way he would let me. In the only way I could." A bird sings somewhere in the near distance of its joy in the still, silent beauty of the space between civilization still called nature. "He was my hero. He was my brother."

"And in that, we see him in a similar light."

"Are you still planning on taking his sword?"

There's a space of silence between us. "No. I have all the strength I need… What wish will you make to end the jewel?"

The glow of it's pure light warms the distance. "There's no wish I could make pure enough now that would end the war within it. It's pure and I'm pure so long as I remain as I am… I can protect it."

"Miko…"

"Yes, Sesshomaru?"

"If ever you need assistance in the protection of the jewel, walk to the West while the sun rises on the day of the crescent moon. Do not stop until the moon sets in the same skies. At daylight, you will find me."

"Why would you offer this to me?"

"Perhaps because I wish."

"Perhaps I need to stand alone for once, Sesshomaru, Lord of the West… But I thank you, all the same."

The world is too heavy, the future too grand. We begin to make our way and yet, both of us pause. "She made weeds flowers and starlight the departed staring down from a black sky. There is less now in the world for her lack."

"Yes. There is."

We turn from each other and walk away, neither knowing our direction nor caring to. Time will pass. We will circle each other in our eternal wanderings, but never meet. Such is the way of day and night. Yet, there are moments when the night is longest or the day outlasts the darkened cool, we meet across an expanse, casting our shadows together before we move onto our own paths again, grateful for the knowledge that we do not own the sky.


	2. A Span of Time and Space

Five hundred years is a long time I do not own Inuyasha

**I continue this story with a dedication and thanks to Langus and Sugaroo whose constructive criticism and truthful words were enough to inspire what happens next.**

Five hundred years is a long time. It is a long time to walk alone. They parted on a warm, almost cheerful early summer morning. The birds were singing and the wind was whispering in the trees its secrets of ages past. If you had stopped in that clearing with them, you would not have even been aware of what had occurred only a fraction of an hour before unless you had senses acute enough to detect the curtain of blood coating the land only a short walk to the North and to the South.

She walked to the East. He walked to the West. They did not stop until they reached the ocean. For five hundred years, she would watch the sun rise and he would watch it set. For half a century, when the sister moon climbed high in the sky, she would witness its ascent and know he would watch it descend into the sea. On nights of the crescent moon, she wondered, mostly, if he was watching his palace gates rather than the sea when dawn approached. In matter of fact, her wondering was correct.

His eyes were transfixed on the gate, watching for a slight form decorated in the traditional white and cardinal red of the pure and virtuous miko. He watched for her long, free ebony hair flashing blue in the coming dawn, illuminated like the center of the hottest flame. He watched for the only other being on the face of the earth that understood his loneliness. All around him the world changed and shifted. It changed and mutated. His servants either relinquished their immortal coils in search of peace or joined the mortal world. After only a few centuries, he found himself the only habitant of a vast palace hidden from the human world with a spell that shifted it from its place in time to another. He was out of time, lost in his own viewing a changing world around him, all the while waiting for her.

What would he have thought if he knew, every cycle of the moon, they were staring at each other with only space and time separating them? That she had, in turn, looked to the West as the crescent moon set and wondered what might have happened if she'd simply started walking that morning? Five hundred years is such a long time to wonder and mortal hearts and minds and souls are not attuned to eternal patience. A human's greatest strength as well as weakness is that they have very little time and so it makes them feel more acutely, desire more fully and move more quickly toward their goals. They only have a brief span before oblivion and rebirth in which they will never remember what had come before. Humans are not built for eternity and yet, that is what she was given.

She could not say what caused her to leave her home built on sacred ground that cold morning. It was a compulsion like none other she had known in her mortal and immortal life. At dawn, instead of watching the sunrise, she turned to the West and began walking. Her whole being was in tune with the cycle of the moon and so she knew exactly what day it was. She knew where she was walking and she knew where and with whom she would find herself in the time of only a pair of days.

The days should have gone past like seconds. She had known them to do such in her long time sequestered from the world, but they did not. The moments them selves moved like the eternities she'd once imagined when she only had the short span of a mortal woman to live. Each step seemed to take the whole of her half a millennia, as if time itself was forcing her to slow in an attempt to keep the distance between them. This time forced her to think on what day it was rather than where she was going. Today, her heart told her, was the day she first slipped into the well. Time was, indeed, slowing for her. She could exist in a world where there was both her younger, more naïve self and her eternal self, the jewel had ensured such, however, once the young Kagome had fallen through the pathway through worlds, her world began to stop. She began to stop.

She understood that it was the compulsion of the jewel that she go to Sesshomaru. She had heard tales from wandering hanyou and youkai who had hidden themselves from the mortal world about the Taiyoukai's palace by the Western sea. As her home was sacred and hidden from prying eyes by cloaking and warding spells the jewel had helped her erect, Sesshomaru's home was outside of time and the reach of the hands of those who did not know its secret. Those who had told her of the palace did not even know its secret. Their ancestors had, but had never told them of how to return to the Western Lord's home and so they were forced to live in a changing world where they remained the same.

She took pity on them and gave them shelter for as long as they wished, but she never shared the secret pathway to Sesshomaru's home. It had been his gift to her. She smiled sadly as she realized the only gifts Sesshomaru had ever given her were the gifts of what were secret. He had been the one who had enlightened them on the power Teutsaiga had over Inuyasha's inuyoukai blood, after all. She clutched the sword she tightly held to her chest. She'd taken it with her, the only possession that had any real meaning to her aside from the jewel she still possessed and wore like a testament around her neck.

She whispered, as only a prayer could be whispered, into the blurred and stilled world around her where time had slowed. "Midoriko, sister priestess whose soul still lives in the Shikon no Tama… Inu no Taisho, whose life still flows in the sword I hold… Please hear me… Help me to the Lord Sesshomaru and his home… Give me sanctuary through time so I might reach him… Please, for the eternal love you both knew and that I feel now with every step to the West, help me make this journey home…"

His eyes, transfixed on the gateway to his palace, noticed a shimmer in the barrier that separated his home from the changing world. He saw the shaky, uncertain and unsteady form of a slight girl in traditional miko garb push open his eternal gates and walk forward. The dawn light haloed her dark, midnight hair in the inner flame of blue and cast her, as a mirage, before his eyes. It took him a moment to realize she was not a dream. It took him an aching, eternal moment to understand his loneliness was at an end and then, in the span of an instant, he was there, embracing her weary presence against his sturdy chest and basked in the scent of her and the soft sound of joy that slipped from her mouth into his ears.

"I'm home."


End file.
